(Untitled)

[veryscaryrobot]

"Just a Bud Lite."

"Rolling Rock. And a cheese steak."

"Can I have a strawberry daiquiri? With an umbrella? Can it be pink?"

"One ounce of columbite-tantalite, please."

Cameron examines her order. (It's not the daiquiri.)

Comments

[forced_pilgrim]

"Alms?"

Monkey loves columbite-tantalite! Probably.

Guess where Monkey is. It's a fun game.

[veryscaryrobot]

Cameron doesn't guess. She does look around.

And echo, "Alms?"

[forced_pilgrim]

"Giving to the church promotes a good rebirth."

Monkey is hanging from a beam by his tail. Obviously.

The fact that he wasn't a minute is obviously something Cameron is going to have to get used to.

[veryscaryrobot]

Fortunately, she's adaptable. And also possessed of a flexible neck.

"Giving what?"

[forced_pilgrim]

"What have you got?"

Pragmatic monkeys are pragmatic.

[veryscaryrobot]

Cameron looks at the bar in her hand. "Metallic ore." And up again. "Clothing. A credit account."

"Do you like milkshakes."

[forced_pilgrim]

"Sure!" Monkey is easy.

[veryscaryrobot]

She orders two -- one for each of them, both strawberry.

Alms!

[forced_pilgrim]

"Surely you will have a fortuitious rebirth!"

Strawberries!

[veryscaryrobot]

Cameron doesn't smile, but her face relaxes in the places people's faces do when they're pleased.

"Have you been reborn?"

[forced_pilgrim]

"I don't think so," Monkey says. "I was spontaneously generated on a mountaintop, and I managed to avoid dying all my life. Now I have escaped the wheel of death and rebirth, all in one bound. That is why I am the Great Sage and the Buddha Victorious in Strife."

"Perhaps I was a wonderfully virtuous person, fortunate enough to be reborn as a magical monkey. But I do not remember it, nor did I see anything about it in Death's paperwork."

[veryscaryrobot]

Cameron takes a noisy sip of her milkshake. She has not entirely mastered straws.

(If she wonders why Death hasn't gone digital, she doesn't say it out loud.)

"The wheel of death and rebirth?"

[forced_pilgrim]

"Yes," Monkey says. "Samsara."

Turning into a Buddha has made his Sanskit much better.

"Every soul, in life, is stained with karma. After death, the soul is weighed and assigned a rebirth. This is the path of rebirth, and it can lead up towards Buddha nature, or down into debasement and emptiness."

"Yet in time, the path leads back upwards, as the soul is purified by continued suffering on the wheel of death and rebirth. As a bodhisattva, my mission is the salvation of all souls, in time."

Monkey is a noisy eater simply because it amuses him.

[veryscaryrobot]

Cameron processes this.

"Through suffering." It's a question.

[forced_pilgrim]

"Suffering is a natural result of desire and sin," Monkey explains. "Just a child learns to not to touch fire, or he will be burned, the soul learns to concentrate on higher things, as it progresses."

In theory.

Slurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp.

[veryscaryrobot]

This is a more functional reason for the existence of pain than anyone else has given Cameron, and she accepts it peacefully.

"Souls are reborn," she says. "But not bodies." This, too, is a question. Someone is having trouble with inflections today.